I was a slow convert to the idea of ebooks. My wife bought one of the first Kindles, and I couldn’t get past the off-putting appearance of the text on the screen in the Kindle’s first iteration. But then I tried the Kindle app for Windows. And the Kindle app for my Android Tablet. And slowly began to fall in love. I could read anywhere. I could free up space on my overflowing and limited physical bookshelves. I could easily quote what I had just read in a blog post. The idea of being able to carry my entire library with me and having it accessible in locations as diverse as the treadmill at the gym or a seat on an airplane became increasingly irresistible.

But not my entire library, alas. There are numerous examples of books that I’d repurchase in a second to read on my Kindle that simply aren’t there yet. Nor are they available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader; I’ve searched.

Off the top of my head, in an ideal world here’s what I’d like to see in the Kindle format. Amazon links are included, if you’d like to get started reading any of these titles now in good ol’ dead tree format — which might be a good idea, as I suspect the wait for some of these might be glacial.

■ Alvin Toffler’s Back Catalog: Toffler’s Future Shock was a huge bestseller when it was first published in 1970. A decade later, The Third Wave, the sequel to Future Shock, would be name-checked by Newt Gingrich during the heady days of the “Republican Revolution” in 1995, shortly after he became speaker of the House, which gives a sense of how the book’s predictions held up in the interim 15 years. Toffler’s War and Anti-War applied the principles of the Third Wave to warfare; Powershift applied them to business. Given that The Third Wave was a pretty accurate prediction of how the Internet reshaped society in the 1990s, if any book deserves to be available in electronic format, it’s this one. Where is it? (For my interviews with Toffler, click here and here.)

■ Profiles of the Future, by Arthur C. Clarke: A quarter century before Star Trek: The Next Generation displayed its first replicator onscreen, Clarke was writing about them in Profiles, along with plenty of other futuristic technology; some we now take for granted (such as the Internet and the Kindle) and others that are still on the drawing board. Again, why isn’t such a forward-thinking book not an ebook as well?

■ Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Carolyn Geduld. Speaking of when Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic 2001: A Space Odyssey left so many audiences baffled in the late 1960s, co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke was fond of saying, “Read the book, see the movie, repeat the dosage.” Right idea, and while Clarke’s novelization of 2001is available on Kindle, it’s not necessarily the best book for cracking the film’s mysteries. If I had to hand one baffled 2001 viewer the Cliff’s Notes to the movie, it would be Geduld’s book from 1973, which thoroughly charts out the film’s plot and leitmotifs.

The flat-panel news and information devices the astronauts read while eating dinner in 2001 directly inspired the iPad and Kindle. Now that technology has finally caught up Kubrick’s 1968 vision, shouldn’t the book that places them into context be accessible on those devices as well?

■ The Death of the Grown-Up,by Diana West. The subhead of West’s book is “How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” As Michelle Malkin noted in 2007 when she interviewed West on her book, others have written about the increasing child-like naiveté of society, but West was perhaps the first to explain how it has hamstrung our fight in what was once called the Global War on Terror. That we had (have?) a war named after tactics rather than the enemy we’re fighting is due to the GWOT receiving its name largely through a process of elimination, as West noted in her book and the articles that preceded it, as political correctness allows few other choices.

The Bauhaus has a bad reputation lately, and perhaps because its practitioners were all on the Left, but they, no less than the Nazis, wanted to return a spiritual dimension to modernity. Everyone knows about Philip Johnson’s 1930s enthusiasm for the Nazis, a taste that was widely shared among the intelligentsia. I wrote about the austerity of the Bauhaus here: http://clarespark.com/2012/09/08/what-is-a-materialist/.

John Barth’s Tidewater Tales (a novel), because it epitomizes the joy of new birth in the face of pending catastrophe… in the novel the threat of nuclear war, whereas our present threats are no less existential for being less specific in focus.

Good list, thanks. Maybe add:
Iberia, by James A. Michener, 1984. Dense and detailed to a level many today will find difficult, it’s the best writing about Spain since Washington Irving, and a fine check on your own perceptions and biases generally. Also, a primer on how to get under the hood on a subject you once knew nothing about. Spain haters around here — David Goldman, for example — would likely benefit. Finally available on Kindle, it’s an effective antidote to chutzpah and horseshit.

Similarly, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals and John Corry’s My Times, an account of his tenure at NYT and the start of the neo-conservative movement – and note that Corry is a non-interventionist neo-conservative.

I have to mention that whan I saw 2001, the only thing that seemed unrealistic to me was the flat-panel screens, and that’s about the only thing that came true. (And who knew that PAN-AM would go bankrupt?)

If Buckley thought the NYT straight in the early 70′s, it’s because he wasn’t invovled with anything Jewish. I still recall how the number of Jews at a demonstation would go down and the number of Arabs up as the NY paper got more liberal and more Jewish. You can even go back to period of the founding of Israel, when the NYT referred to the Religious Zionist Mizrachi (the progenitor of Bennet’s party) as “ultra-Orthodox”. (We won’t even get into the cover-up of the Holocaust.)

I have never understood why the Kindle is preferred to the Nook. An E-reader is about availabilty and as a publisher Barnes and Noble is going to have access to more books. That was the deciding facter when I chose Nook. People buy the Kindle for the same reason they by an iPnone over Samsung or HTC. It’s the cool device for cool people.

It depends. I paid $60 for a Nook Simple Touch on Black Friday. This is a better value than a Kindle, especially since the Nook comes without ads. Regarding the current prices of $79 for a Nook and $69 for a Kindle, I would still consider the Nook a better value – for a variety of reasons.

In addition to the price and lack of ads, I bought a Nook to keep Amazon’s competition in business. As I used the Nook to read books in literature and history that are now out of copyright, neither Amazon nor Barnes and Noble would be making a lot of money off me.

In general, prices are lower at Amazon. Though an e-book I recently bought from B&N was priced the same at Amazon. I would estimate that Amazon has a bigger selection than Barnes and Noble. It is certainly easier to find older books still in copyright at Amazon, perhaps due to Amazon’s also linking to many bookstores. I have purchased a hard copy of a book from a bookstore what I accessed from the Amazon site.

The Amazon website is more user-friendly than the B&N site. B&N doesn’t make it easy for people who want to keep them in business.

An E-reader is about availabilty and as a publisher Barnes and Noble is going to have access to more books.

What makes you think that? A publisher only has special access to their own properties.

If anything, B&N’s advantage is that it’s already a large distributor of books. Problem is, Amazon’s also one… and almost certainly a larger one.

Note that with free software you can read essentially any book on any reader (and remove any annoying DRM for your archival purposes), so what you’re really getting from a specific model is easy access to one specific store.

RebeccaH: I think most of the errors are due to many books being “published” electronically by doing OCR scans of printed books, rather than real direct-digital-to-digital releases from the electronic masters the presses run off of.

[Data point: My Kindle copy of Foucault’s Pendulum has a fair number of obvious OCR errors. My Kindle copy of The Prague Cemetery has no errors that I can recall. The former is old enough that they presumably thought it easier/cheaper to OCR, whereas the latter, being current, would have been a direct digital export.)

I bought a Nook for 2 basic reasons:
1 – a 1 day discount coupon for 50% off
2 – at the time you could only get library ebooks in their format.
I bought a Kindle for my husband. Both have their aggravations and good points. We are both big readers and usually bring several books on vacation. Saves room and weight in our luggage. Plus there just isn’t room in the house for the books we have.
Now, of course, I have to use calibri to convert his kindle books to my Nook. And vice versa.

I have wanted to read “The Camp of the Saints”. I think it’s blacklisted from about everywhere as a racist diatribe, but I think it would be interesting to read.
I’d like to have more of the old Whole Earth Catalogs available as quaint histories.

“[PDF]
The Camp of the Saints – The Social Contract Presshttp://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/five-two/raspail.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
by J Raspail – Cited by 64 – Related articles
The novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1973) continues on its controversial course. Most recently it provided the …
[PDF]
The Other Camp of the Saints: Comparing Christian and Muslim …http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/p/jpj1/othercamp.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
The Asian masses of Camp of the Saints are explicitly fighting to erase Europe’s failed God, and passages from the biblical book of. Revelation are scattered …” end paste,

Your horizon is too short. My first e book (a mistake) is the “City of God”, St. Augustine, published circa 400 AD. The mistake is that it is actually 22 books, and each page contains 2- 3 words, which require clicking to the internal dictionary to comprehend. Very heavy, slow, reading, think advanced calculus. And being ignorant of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, I lose him occasionally. I started last summer and just finished book XVI. His technology is laughable, but his comprehension of theology, and philosophy, are yet to be equaled.

I am an old man. What I think is miraculous is considered like a pencil to my g’ kids. Their world will be unrecognizable to me. But I will be glad to get off the bus. What passes for erudite thinking in today’s America terrifies me.

Great list. I hope you have hard copy back up for your kindle favorites. You do remember what Winston’s job was in 1984-to bring it up to date ,he would today be a Kindle “editor” . Kindle giveth,and Kindle,or somebody else, can taketh away.My hard cover books; “Alice in Wonderland” and “Gulliver’s Travels”, explain today’s situation very well, and can be copies rather easily without a chip factory around, and without permission of the Bureau of e.

As one many of whose old books ARE available on Kindle (after a fair amount of trouble and delay), I think the problem in many cases here is rights. Most of the books referred to were of course written before ebooks were even a gleam in Jeff Bezos’ eye. Many contracts were drawn in ignorance of this new form. Now they have to be untraveled. Such things take time and inclination. Not even Alvin Toffler can see the future.

It’s not the fault of Amazon or B&N that these books aren’t out in ebooks. In the case of many older books, publishers didn’t buy electronic rights because ebooks didn’t exist. Certainly any book out of print is unlikely to become an ebook unless authors do the conversion themselves or sell the rights to a small e-publisher.

Be sure to click the “I’d like to read this book on Kindle” button at Amazon whenever you see a book listed there without a Kindle option. They use that vote to encourage publishers and authors to make such books available, and it often does work. Many books for which I’ve previously clicked that button are now available on Kindle. A recent example is “Take Back Your Government”, by Robert A. Heinlein and William H. Patterson, Jr.

As for why not Nook, my answer is that I only need one Ebook format, not an endless succession of competing ones, just as I only ever needed MP3 format for my music. Amazon wisely made free readers available for their Kindle format on pretty much any electronic device able to hold a book, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve even deleted iBooks from my iPhones and iPad, after not using it even once in over a year. No offence to B&N & Nook, but they missed the party back when it mattered. I do also have Calibre, so if the needed format ever changes, I should be able to make any needed updates, and have also used it to convert Ebooks NOT available for Kindle into Kindle-compatible formats.

B&N does have a free Nook app for the PC & the iPhone. It syncs with your Nook so you have access to all the books in your library and the app syncs your bookmarks on the book you are currently reading.

I went with the Nook because it was the only one that had color at the time. Now, I’d probably go with a more versatile tablet: iPad, Samsung, or Windows.

To echo a commenter above, Project Gutenberg ROCKS! Also, many public libraries now lend books in e-format (ePub or .pdf). You have to download them on to your PC and upload them to your e-reader.

At this point, I would just settle for better proofing and editing for the books that are in e-format. There seem to be far more errors in my ebooks than I ever found in printed versions. This is probably due to the fact that formerly, editors and proofreaders could make notations on paper, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to do that in an electronic format.

Or it could just be that today’s editors are uneducated and careless. You decide.

Com’on, HEINLEIN!!! I have a hard time finding Heinlein in ebook formats. I noticed that you haven’t mention Baen ebooks for good Sci-Fi books, many free.

I love my Kindle (I’m on my third, the Fire) My wife can’t understand that I have a (mostly) complete library of Heinlein in Greg Press acid free books but I still want the same book on my Kindle. It’s hard to explain but Kindles are just so damn convenient!!